Steely Dan – Gaucho (1980)

“There were multiple drummers on this album. You had Jeff Porcaro, Bernard Purdie, Steve Gadd and Rick Moratta. I know that Bernard Purdie played on Babylon Sisters, but I don’t know who specifically played on the other cuts. In any event, it’s all great.

“Steely Dan took a long time to make their albums. I remember Jeff Porcaro saying that they did about 150 edits on one of his songs. It’s amazing that you can manipulate a performance like that. The argument on one side is that you’re taking all of the life out of a person’s playing, but the end result is a recording that sounds amazing. Maybe if the performance is so perfect, you can’t ruin it. Gaucho certainly proves that.

“The ultimate goal of music isn’t always, ‘Hey, it’s one take, and here’s what we did.’ No, sometimes it’s ‘This is what we did in order to get it to sound amazing.’ If it moves you, it’s right. In the case of Steely Dan, they were real studio rats, and they analyzed each nuance of a performance to achieve something spectacular."